Bottom dump trailers have been utilized to haul and transport ash or other load materials. However, the design of typical bottom dump trailer doors has presented certain obstacles to ash haulage. In conventional bottom dump trailers, the bottom dump doors pivot outwardly to unload the ash. Unfortunately, this type of bottom dump trailer leaves substantial quantities of ash in the trailer body that requires additional time and equipment to unload. Furthermore, conventional bottom dump trailer doors are not designed to accommodate the varying material consistencies characteristic of ash hauling.
In order to overcome this problem, bottom dump ash trailers have utilized doors which extend along the bottom width of the trailer and open the full width of the trailer by sliding along the longitudinal axis of the bottom dump trailer. Typically, the bottom dump ash trailer will have rear and front doors which transport and unload the load material from the rear and front portions of the trailer body, respectively. During dumping, the front and rear doors slide along the longitudinal axis of the bottom dump trailer in order to open and unload the load material. Heretofore, dumping of the ash or other load material using these sliding doors has proven to be relatively difficult, inefficient and cumbersome to operate, requiring numerous operational steps to lock and unlock each individual door and to slide each door open to dump the load material. In addition, each step in the dumping procedure required several components to operate which have proven expensive and time consuming to install and maintain.